


5 Ways Parse Could Have Gotten a Cat (+1 Way He Actually Did)

by goodmorning



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Cats, Gen, also kind of a character study type thing of parse?, i just love cats ok, mostly it's just about cats, or his mother?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 08:44:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8743156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmorning/pseuds/goodmorning
Summary: See title. Or;

  Parse is the captain of a hockey team. An NHL team, even.


  Which means he has to do all the PR now.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Has someone done this already? I feel like someone's probably done this already.

**1.**

Shortly after Kent, her precious Kenny, is born, Katherine Parson's sister tries to give her a kitten.

This strikes her as a very bad idea.

"I don't have _time_ for a kitten, Amy," she says. "Do you know how much care a baby takes? And what if it hurt him? What if he's allergic? No. No kittens." It's maybe a little sharper than she intends, but between caring for Kenny and worrying about him she's only had about twelve hours of sleep in the last four days.

Amy reads that like a book and comes to stay for a week. She brings a kitten with her, swearing that it's hers, that she doesn't want to leave it alone. Katherine can read _that_ as easily as Amy'd read her, and so she does her best to ignore the skinny little ginger thing that seems to follow her everywhere.

It turns out cats are very difficult to ignore. It sits on the kitchen table and watches her when she's eating breakfast. It sits on the nightstand and watches her when she tries to nap. It sits on the changing table and watches her when she sits in the rocking chair with Kenny, nursing him or soothing him to sleep or just spending time with him, breathing in the soft baby smell she's never liked before now off his small downy head.

The night before Amy is set to leave, Katherine wakes to the sound of her sister singing quietly to Kenny. She looks up at the cat on her nightstand. It blinks at her, slowly, like it knows every rude thing she's ever thought about it and it still doesn't give a shit.

She reaches up and pets him.

When she wakes up, he's tucked himself into a tiny ball between her chin and her chest.

Amy goes home. The cat stays.

Marcel Miaonne, as she calls him, takes to sleeping in Kenny's room most of the time. The first time she catches him in the crib she panics slightly, but he does it so often she starts to get used to it. Sometimes she finds him sitting perfectly still, staring at the door, sphynxlike in expression, like he's guarding something precious and just waiting for someone to try him. Other times he finds her, waiting patiently for her to finish what she's doing and following her back to Kenny's room when she's done.

He still sleeps in her bed some nights, when she's feeling lonely. Sometimes he wakes her up before Kenny really gets going, which is nice, because he's a pretty stubborn crier.

Mostly he's just _there_ , in that way cats have, purring, waiting patiently to be stroked. It's relaxing, especially on days when Kenny won't stop crying no matter what she does, days when she feels alone and overwhelmed.

Maybe a kitten wasn't such a bad idea after all.

**2.**

Kenny is a few weeks past three when his grandmother passes away.

Katherine puts on a sensible black dress and a mourning face and waits for the condolence calls. She refuses to take a three-year-old to a funeral, and watching Kenny is all the excuse she needs to avoid it herself.

The entirety of Agatha's estate is left to her "only child and his immediate family."

The estate includes a cat.

He's the biggest, fluffiest, whitest Persian she's ever seen. Agatha's name for him was Fluffy.

Katherine rechristens him Catrick. Catrick Paw.

\--

Katherine can't deny she was a little worried, when she saw Catrick, about how things would work with Kenny. Three is a rambunctious age and Kenny is a rambunctious kid, and Catrick doesn't look like the kind of cat who's willing to take any shit.

In a way, she's right. She tells Kenny to treat Catrick nicely and gently, which is a good move. Then she goes into specifics, which is not.

"And don't pull his tail," she says, just as the phone starts ringing. 

\--

Having told the telemarketer she's not interested, she returns to the living room, picking up the pace when she hears a small thud, like a large cat or a small child falling over onto a carpeted floor. 

When she gets through the door, she sees Kenny is the one who fell. He's sitting flat on his butt, staring at the cat. He has a hand to his face, but he isn't crying. If she's being honest, she'd say he looks almost impressed. Catrick, meanwhile, is alternating between licking his tail and giving disgusted looks to Kenny, so she doesn't have to be a time-traveler to know what happened here.

"What did I tell you not to do, Kenny?" Katherine asks.

"Don't pull his tail," Kenny says to her.

"Are you going to do it again?" 

"No!" Kenny says emphatically, and his serious toddler face is still so funny to her that it's hard to keep from laughing.

She manages, barely. "Show me your face," she says, expecting there to be bleeding. But he takes his hand off his cheek, and there's not a mark there.

"He hitted me!" Kenny explains. "And then I falled down!" With the floodgates open, he keeps going, babbling in occasionally-indecipherable toddler-speak, just like he always does. She nods and says 'mm-hmm' and 'wow' at the appropriate times, but mostly she's looking at the cat.

Catrick notices her approval, and looks up. He blinks at her, once, before returning his attention to his tail.

**3.**

When Kent is ten years old, he's followed home from school.

Not by a creep. Not by a friend. Not even by a dog.

By a cat. A tuxedo cat.

He feels like kind of a fake when he puts on his best pouting face to try and guilt Mom into keeping it, like he's one of those kids on TV or something. When he says the words, though, he's still kind of surprised when she says yes.

(So maybe he also promised to take care of it. He's pretty sure he's not going to be good at that. He's pretty sure she knows it, too.)

\--

They put up posters, but nobody calls.

\--

A month later, they've fed the cat up, but he's still just 'the cat'. When Dad was home last week, he'd called him 'Fat Bastard,' and he really is one, but Kent doesn't actually want to call the cat that.

It's when he's watching the Rangers' captain lead them to a 5-1 win over the Bruins that he gets the idea.

\--

"Meowk Hissier!" he says to Mom at breakfast the next morning.

"I like that," she says, after he explains what he's talking about.

\--

Meowk loves Kent, and he likes Mom a lot, too, but he doesn't like Dad at all.

Kent finds this hilarious, until Meowk makes Dad's throat bleed and Dad wants to get rid of him. 

Mom has to talk him down.

\--

Kenny doesn't cry until he's in bed that night, Meowk purring reassuringly in his ear.

**4.**

Amy's daughter Josephine develops a severe cat allergy the summer Kenny turns twelve. Katherine doesn't know why, but she says she'll take their cat in. Even more inexplicably, she offers to drive to Jersey and pick him up.

"We call him Marty," Amy says, handing Kenny a massive grey tabby. After two hours in the car with Kenny complaining the whole way, Katherine thinks she can be excused for being slow on the uptake, especially since she had to spend the last twenty minutes or so lecturing him on his behavior. Really, it's not acceptable for him to be acting like that at his age - and he never does it when they have to travel for hockey, either, and...

"Marty?" she asks, feeling like she's missing something.

"Martin Bropurr," Amy says, and Katherine can't help but put a hand to her forehead.

Kenny looks kind of thrilled.

\--

When they finally head home, Kenny won't stop asking questions, rapid-fire and excited and not at all like an almost-teenager. It makes her feel a little nostalgic.

\--

But Kenny is still Kenny, and he's still as overdramatic as ever.

"Marty almost suffocated me!" he complains at breakfast, which she translates in her head to mean that the cat was sleeping on Kenny's pillow, near but not on his face.

"My hand will never work again, now how am I supposed to practice wristers?" he whines after Marty accidentally grabs his hand instead of the cat toy. It's three small punctures and a scratch.

"He doesn't want to play, I think he's sick!" he worries, while Marty basks in a perfect pool of sunlight on the stairs.

"It's hard to sleep without him," Kenny says over the phone, probably while his roommate is absent, and she smiles.

"I know," Katherine says.

**5.**

When Kent is thirteen he finally convinces his mother to let him get a pet. They go to the animal shelter after school that Friday, and he runs to see the dogs. They're mostly happy to see him, tails wagging, tongues lolling from their smiling doggy faces. He pets them all for a while, lets them jump up and lick his face, and he likes them, he really does, but he doesn't think he loves any of them.

He goes to find his mother, to ask her about that, and whether he should pick one or wait and see if they get new ones in that he likes better. She's in the cat room.

It's a lot quieter, only occasional scratching in a litter box and the jingling of kitten toys. As he gets closer to his mother, it's quiet enough that he starts to hear purring.

It's all coming from the black cat she's petting through the bars of the cage, and even before he sees the 'one day left' sign, the cat looks at him and meows a little bit and Kent just knows.

\--

"What are you naming him?" the lady doing their paperwork asks, and Kent thinks of legends and comebacks and second chances and the best in the world.

"Meowio Lemew," he says, and his mother smiles.

**+1.**

Parse is the captain of a hockey team. An NHL team, even.

Which means he has to do all the PR now.

It's charity calendar time, the profits of which they're splitting with the SPCA, and Parse sort of wishes they were doing a calendar for models or firemen instead, but it's better than sick kids. Sick kids make him feel one part sad and two parts like a dick, and he really doesn't need that.

\--

He poses with a dog. He's wearing an American flag t-shirt, and he wishes they'd told him they wanted him to be July, because he has much better (flashier) ones at home. Maybe a tank top, to show off the guns? That would sell calendars. The dog is wearing a matching bandanna. It's a golden retriever.

If that's a matching hair joke, he's going to pout at someone on PR later.

They take a few pictures and move on to the next guy; Parse thinks he's done, then, but he's not. They want him to be alone on the cover. He wonders what the point of a cover even is, since it's not like you ever see it, but he doesn't ask.

They give him the tiniest, fluffiest tabby kitten he's ever seen. Then they take about a thousand pictures.

He's holding her in one hand. He's holding her in both. He's leaning back with her snugged up in the hollow of his throat, supporting her with an arm. She's in the crook of his elbow. He's holding her in his hat. She's climbing his shoes.

He puts her on his shoulder and holds steady; she doesn't fall. When he turns his head to look at her, she puts a paw on his face to keep her balance, and he smiles.

That's the one that makes the cover.

\--

He's at home when they send it to him for approval. Looking at it makes his chest squeeze a little.

Parse is at the shelter ten minutes later.

\--

The media eat it up, which surprises him a little. They're all about narratives, after all, and Parse has been the 'bad boy' for so long; adopting a pet doesn't really fit that pre-written storyline at all. But after they get past his reasons for adopting, they ask him her name.

He hasn't actually picked one yet.

But Parse has wanted a pet for a long time, and he always thought he'd name it after someone great. Which he apparently was thinking out loud, because they ask him again what her name is.

"Kit Purrson," he says, and they all assume he's referring to himself.

He doesn't clarify.

\--

"Kenny," his mom says on their weekly call, "you didn't tell me you were getting a cat!"

"I didn't know either," he says, and listens to her laughter from thousands of miles away.

"What did you name her?" she asks. "Meownon Rheaume? Amanda Katsel?"

"I named her Kit Purrson," he says. "After you."

"Oh, Kenny," she says, at the same time he's saying, "I miss you."

There's a long pause, then, as she tears up a little and he looks for words.

"You're the greatest person I know."

"Oh, Kenny," she says again, and he has a moment of clarity: this side of him is the only private thing he has that will never become public.

\--

He posts a photo of Kit in the Cup, captions it "greatest trophy, greatest cat, greatest namesake" and smiles.

He can hide the truth right under their noses.

**Author's Note:**

> The third cat is based heavily on my cat, and the story is mostly true. (...Write what you know?)
> 
> Other potential cat names included Wayne Catzky and Jaromew Tigr.


End file.
